Speechify – Text to Speech [REVIEW]

Technology has a feature that constantly changes and grows to become its better version. Almost every other day, new software is launched to the world that helps make our lives much more accessible and a better place to live. One such program or one can say an app is Speechify which is available for both mobile and desktop.

This app makes our daily life more accessible by reading out texts aloud in a computerized voice. It uses the famous text-to-speech technology and integrates AI, deep learning, machine learning, and several other technologies to create a voice that sounds natural. It is not limited to that as this well-known program also converts printed texts, be it on documents, textbooks, etc., into audio using optical character recognition technology.

It gives its users the flexibility to upload the captured pictures of text and, afterwards, hear it aloud. It can handle almost any text file that you can provide.

The beginning of speechify

Founded by Cliff Weitzman in 2016, an undergraduate student at Brown University at that time who got the inspiration to make this app from his experience of suffering from Dyslexia. At first, it was just a tool exclusively for him to assist him in his assigned readings. Still, after a while, he got an idea to help his peers who are too suffering from Dyslexia, have reading difficulties, and are struggling just like him. Still, it got a huge audience base and literally, anyone can benefit from its several incredible features.

Since its release, it has gained a lot of acclaim, and with over twenty million plus downloads, it is needless to say that it is highly liked by the users so much that it is certified as the number one text-to-speech reader. As its official website states, this industry-leading reader can speed through documents, articles, PDFs, emails, or anything you might want to read.

Let’s know more

It has a little blue button at the beginning of each paragraph, also stating the listening duration. It will read to you in a voice that helps you to comprehend and recall the content. As its official website states, it has a feature to read up to nine times quicker than the typical reader to save up your time. This app has the flexibility to be used anywhere, be it your desktop or your phone, so now you have the freedom to listen to your libraries anywhere.

This app abiding by its motive of being straightforward and having a user-friendly interface, now supports over fourteen languages. Being an inclusive app it is, it thus has various AI voices and accents for these many languages. One of the features that makes it the best is its natural voice. Speechify is a preferred software among users worldwide because of its high-quality representatives, created to seem like an actual human was reading the text. Additionally, you may quickly alter the voices to suit your tastes!

To avoid getting caught up with the features, this app also provides the facility of lessons to help you out; thus, you can get the most of its key benefits.

Now the question is how to get started with it. Fortunately, you won’t have to put a lot of time into understanding how things operate. Instead, as soon as you download it to your device, you may start using it. For desktops, you can download the extension; for Android, you can download it from the play store for iOS, and for macOS, you can get it from the Apple store or download extension.

As the trend has set to move, every service that earlier was being provided free of cost now charging money. The same is with it. It also has distinct premium features in its paid plan apart from its free one. Although in the free plan, no feature is hampered but in the premium plan, the same idea and feature are taken to the next level to be more productive; thus, you can save more time.

Free Plan vs Premium:

What does a free plan have?

The features of the free plan include:-

• In the free plan, you get to hear standard voices.
• In this, you can effortlessly upload texts of any file format.
• The text speed can be increased up to two times.
• In the free plan, one can scan the texts to listen.

These features are continued in the premium but with an upgrade of new features.

Premium features:

• The voice is of the premium, high-quality artificial intelligence-generated natural voice to increase the enjoyment and delight of listening.
• The premium plan supports over sixty languages and can be translated instantly.
• The text extraction using cutting-edge OCR technology is of high quality thus boosting deep learning toward content.
• It has no speed restriction thus you can easily skip through content.
• It can be easily imported.
• It can easily take notes on the content.
• Lastly, to give you that VIP feels you have assistance available anytime.

Know the drawbacks:

Like every other product, it too has its own pros & cons. The pros are as already stated above but there are certain drawbacks of this product as well, such as:

• The app is a bit too expensive and even after paying money, it still lacks certain features that are in current demand. Even in the premium plan, there are several restrictions on the number of words and characters.
• There are little voices and languages. You get over four HD voices for a few languages, but for others, it is just one or two. Several languages do not even support HD voices.
• It cannot export the audio file you get to listen or take notes if you have a premium plan.

Conclusion:

Although there are specific cons to it, the pros still outweigh it to a certain extent considering the tough competition it gives its competitors. It has managed to reach a vast arena of audiences and is serving them pretty well but it still does need a lot of developments to sustain its user-friendly interface.